Comprehensive performance assessment and public services improvement in England? A case study of the benefits administration service in local government

The purpose of this paper is to independently evaluate the impact of the Comprehensive Performance Assessment regime on one particular public service, namely the provision of Council Tax and Housing Benefits distributed by local authorities throughout the course of the regime. This service was assessed in every iteration of the CPA methodologies and it included one of the few key performance indicators (KPIs) where the definition of the performance indicator, the means of collection and the public reporting of its results, remained the same throughout the CPA period between 2002 and 2008

Housing and council tax benefits administration in England: a long-term perspective on the performance of the local government delivery system

This paper evaluates the performance of the Council Tax and Housing Benefits Administration Services delivered by local authorities since the current system for the delivery of these benefits was introduced. During this period the performance of local government has been regulated and influenced by four successive national delivery regimes imposed by central governments namely Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT); Best Value (BV); Comprehensive Performance Assessments (CPA) and Comprehensive Area Assessments (CAA). An earlier paper (XXXX et al. forthcoming) examined the CPA period in detail and found a significant improvement in performance across all types of authorities in all parts of the country during this period. The current paper is intended to complement this earlier analysis and provide a longer term perspective on the performance of the benefits service under successive regimes between 1993 and 2010. The findings show that under CCT the performance of the system was poor, there were wide variations in individual local authority’s performance, with many acknowledged inadequacies in the system and unacceptably high levels of fraud. However in this period and in the subsequent BV period the antecedents of some of the tools and techniques subsequently used to drive improvement in the CPA era were either put in place or were being developed

Automatic assembly design project 1968/9 :|breport of economic planning committee

Investigations into automatic assembly systems have been carried out. The conclusions show the major features to be considered by a company operating the machine to assemble the contact block with regard to machine output and financial aspects. The machine system has been shown to be economically viable for use under suitable conditions, but the contact block is considered to be unsuitable for automatic assembly. Data for machine specification, reliability and maintenance has been provided

Reflectionless measures and the Mattila-Melnikov-Verdera uniform rectifiability theorem

A new proof is given of the Mattila-Melnikov-Verdera theorem on the uniform rectifiability of an Ahlfors-David regular measure whose associated Cauchy transform operator is bounded.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figure

Not just old and sick - the 'will to health' in later life

The end of the ‘Golden Age’ of welfare capitalism in the 1970s was the prelude to a period of greater individualisation within societies and was accompanied by an increase in the importance of consumption as a way of organising social relations. During the same period there was also an expansion in the discourses aimed at enhancing the government of the autonomous self. One such discourse operates around what has been termed the ‘will to health’: it suggests that health has become a required goal for individual behaviour and has become synonymous with health itself. The generational groups whose lifecourses were most exposed to these changes are now approaching later life. We explore the extent to which social transformations related to risk, consumption and individualisation are reflected in the construction of later-life identities around health and ageing. We examine how the growth in health-related ‘technologies of the self’ have fostered a distinction between natural and normal ageing, wherein the former is associated with coming to terms with physical decline and the latter associated with maintaining norms of self-care aimed at delaying such decline. Finally, we consider anti-ageing medicine as a developing arena for the construction of later-life identities and discuss the implications of the social changes for researching later life

Quantum counterpart of spontaneously broken classical PT symmetry

The classical trajectories of a particle governed by the PT-symmetric Hamiltonian $H=p^2+x^2(ix)^\epsilon$ ($\epsilon\geq0$) have been studied in depth. It is known that almost all trajectories that begin at a classical turning point oscillate periodically between this turning point and the corresponding PT-symmetric turning point. It is also known that there are regions in $\epsilon$ for which the periods of these orbits vary rapidly as functions of $\epsilon$ and that in these regions there are isolated values of $\epsilon$ for which the classical trajectories exhibit spontaneously broken PT symmetry. The current paper examines the corresponding quantum-mechanical systems. The eigenvalues of these quantum systems exhibit characteristic behaviors that are correlated with those of the associated classical system.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Application to rotary wings of a simplified aerodynamic lifting surface theory for unsteady compressible flow

A general method of predicting airloads is applied to helicopter rotor blades on a full three-dimensional basis using the general theory developed for a rotor blade at the psi = pi/2 position where flutter is most likely to occur. Calculations of aerodynamic coefficients for use in flutter analysis are made for forward and hovering flight with low inflow. The results are compared with values given by two-dimensional strip theory for a rigid rotor hinged at its root. The comparisons indicate the inadequacies of strip theory for airload prediction. One important conclusion drawn from this study is that the curved wake has a substantial effect on the chordwise load distribution